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Out with the old….

I’m going to Canada on the 24th and on Wednesday I realised I’ve only got 2 months left on my passport, someone told me that you have to have 6 months on there to get into, and out of, the country.

Shit.

What fucks me off is that it’s nigh on impossible to find out whether or not that’s true, I called the Canadian embassy, the Canadian something else, I called the Airline and I even called the helpline that comes up at the top of google when you type in anything about British passports. Which, by the way, is not a helpline, it’s a £1.50 a minute recording of a man reading some rules. Luckily I called that one from work. In the end, I Looked it up and found out that if you don’t want to take a day off work to go and sit in a queue in Victoria it normally takes about three weeks from sending off your old one to get your new passport. At this point my pants became almost pure brown.

Eventually I stumbled upon the fact that at some post offices you can take your forms in and they’ll check and stamp them and all that shit for you and then send them off, that shaves a week off the expected return date. So I went for that option.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I have to fill in an “important” form for anything, the walls close in, panic sets in, writing becomes a lot harder and not making a mistake in my surname becomes quantum physics. With the passport application this is tenfold. You have to cram your black ball point pen written capital letters into tiny boxes and if any of them touch the sides of the box (the @ in my email address had me sweating buckets) your application will be rejected by those smug, power crazed bastards. Add to the pressure of this my time constraints and I apparently become an illiterate moron, incapable of remembering my own address.

My first attempt at the form went well, I made it all the way to the end with the concentration of a thrown in at the deep end bomb disposal intern, whacked my signature in the box with a semi confident flourish and then wrote my date of birth in the date box instead of the actual date. The last thing on the form. Bollocks.

I struggled through take two alright and my old passport is winging it’s way to the dusty old dinosaurs at the passport office, along with some mug shots of me looking like a murderer. Please let me have a new one sirs, I’m not a terrorist.

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One thought on “Out with the old….”

What gets me is that you have to put your signature in a box without touching the sides: if it’s ACTUALLY your signature, it shouldn’t really be affected but the size of a box, and so thus fails the passport replacement system.